A few days ago, my Twitter timeline was full of references to and praise for a short piece by Anya de Iongh, who writes about her medical appointment. De Iongh’s piece is very moving in offering a patient’s perspective on what a 10-mnute conversation with a senior physician feels like. A perspective that starts way before the appointment and continues well after it. The author describes an experience that quite a lot of us, patients, know only too well. Myself included. Continue reading “On medical ‘discoveries’”→

About 10 years ago, when I started my interest in things psychiatric and psychological, I participated in a seminar in psychiatry for final (sixth) year students of medicine in Poland. What I heard frightened me. This feeling came back a few days ago. Continue reading “Stop reinventing the wheel”→

A few days ago, Lancet Psychiatry published my essay: Language and psychiatry. The article seems to be quite popular. At the time of writing this, it was tweeted 426 times, which takes my breath away, to be honest. One of the points I make in the article is that clinical communication should be seen in terms of communication goals. In this post I want to elaborate on this. Continue reading “Communication goals”→

“People with depression use language differently – here’s how to spot it” informed us an article from The Conversation. I don’t believe this for one second (like: that’s nonsense), so I decided to investigate. Here are the results of my investigations. Continue reading “Language of depression?”→